Interpsychic Colony
Louie Cordero and Kawayan de Guia
May 30 – June 28, 2026
Curated by
May 30 – June 28, 2026
Interpsychic Colony
Louie Cordero and Kawayan de Guia
It is easy to imagine Kawayan de Guia and Louie Cordero haunting the komiks-for-hire stalls of Baguio and Cubao in the 1980s and ’90s, rifling not only through Pinoy Klasiks, Funny Komiks, Shocker, and Hiwaga, but also stray imports like Marvel and DC comics, Twilight Zone, and Tales from the Crypt, passed hand to hand like contraband dreams.
What endured especially in the imports were not the superheroes but the advertisements buried in the back pages like Sea-Monkeys, X-ray spectacles, hypnosis courses, miracle tonics, and invisible inks. It is from this psychic debris that the two artists seem to have assembled their shared imaginative language.
Interpsychic Colony is their third collaborative voyage, though “collaboration” hardly captures what happens here. Collaboration has its own arithmetic: one is only as good as one’s partner. Here, both artists rise to the occasion with the timing of vaudeville comedians. Their works move through setups, feints, visual non-sequiturs, and elaborate McGuffins. But the punchlines arrive sideways. Humor dissolves into menace. Nostalgia mutates into hallucination.
The references are encyclopedic without becoming academic. Their libraries overflow with comics, Pinoy studies, cinema, pulp fiction and theory, yet the works wear their intelligence lightly. There is none of the dutiful signaling of neo-Marxist or Bakhtinian critique. Instead, the paintings are lurid, playful, and carnivalesque, resembling circus posters or the hand-painted blockbuster billboards once produced in Hyderabad or Accra by artists who may have never seen the films they advertised and therefore invented better ones.
The forty works gathered here feel less like an exhibition than an exchange of coded messages between two compulsive imaginations rifling through the attic of popular culture. Homages appear everywhere: to friends and collaborators, to Jeremy, Yoko Ono, Palito, Ferdinand Marcos, Fidel Castro, Rene Aquitania, and even Lola, Kawayan’s dog.
Both began with twenty works each, Kawayan in Kitma and Louie in Cuenca, before exchanging the papers repeatedly, adding mutations and interventions along the way. By the final pass, Louie went up to Baguio. Their process resembled telepathy, an “interpsychic” relay with images transmitted from one subconscious to the other.
Beneath the riotous humor lies a mood of gathering catastrophe. These are end-times paintings; not simply biblical, but shaped by cultural exhaustion, technological delirium, and historical recursion. This third cycle is darker than the previous ones: more dystopian, more defiant, more conscious of civilizational fatigue. Decolonization, once imagined as liberation, now appears threatened by newer and subtler forms of recolonization.
The works finally read as payloads launched toward an uncertain frontier: forty dispatches from two artists who still believe absurdity may be the last surviving form of resistance.
—Frank Cimatu
About the Artist
About the Artists
Louie Cordero was born in 1978 in Manila, Philippines and is currently based in Cuenca, Batangas. A graduate of the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines and held a residency in the United States at the Vermont Studio Center (2003). He’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). His work has been exhibited at Sonsbeek ’16 transACTION, Netherlands (2016); the Open Sea exhibition at Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2015); World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia (2008); Singapore Biennale (2011); the 14th Jakarta Biennale (2011); and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum (2012).
His work has been exhibited in the Philippines, Jakarta, Thailand, Denmark, Berlin, the Netherlands, France, Australia, and the United States.
Kawayan de Guia (b. 1979), son of the well-known local filmmaker and National Artist for Cinema Kidlat Tahimik (Eric de Guia) and German stained-glass artist Katrin de Guia, is a painter, installation and performance artist based in Baguio City, Philippines. He finished his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines (UP). In 2011, de Guia initiated AX(iS) Art Projects—a biennial gathering of artists from different fields working on the idea of transience, site-specific and community-based works. He is a recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards (2008), the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2009), and the First New York Arts Project Residency Grant (2008). He has had solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, China, and Germany, in spaces such as the Vargas Musuem at UP, the Soka Art Center in Beijing, ARNDT Singapore, Rossi & Rossi Ltd. in London, The Luggage Store in San Francisco, California, The Drawing Room, Singapore Art Museum, the Lopez Memorial Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Artinformal, and MCAD Manila. He was also one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale in 2013. De Guia has participated at the Art Fair Philippines and the recent Manila Biennale.
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
Louie Cordero was born in 1978 in Manila, Philippines and is currently based in Cuenca, Batangas. A graduate of the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines and held a residency in the United States at the Vermont Studio Center (2003). He’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). His work has been exhibited at Sonsbeek ’16 transACTION, Netherlands (2016); the Open Sea exhibition at Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2015); World of Painting, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australia (2008); Singapore Biennale (2011); the 14th Jakarta Biennale (2011); and PANORAMA, Singapore Art Museum (2012).
His work has been exhibited in the Philippines, Jakarta, Thailand, Denmark, Berlin, the Netherlands, France, Australia, and the United States.
Kawayan de Guia (b. 1979), son of the well-known local filmmaker and National Artist for Cinema Kidlat Tahimik (Eric de Guia) and German stained-glass artist Katrin de Guia, is a painter, installation and performance artist based in Baguio City, Philippines. He finished his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines (UP). In 2011, de Guia initiated AX(iS) Art Projects—a biennial gathering of artists from different fields working on the idea of transience, site-specific and community-based works. He is a recipient of the Ateneo Art Awards (2008), the Cultural Center of the Philippines Thirteen Artists Award (2009), and the First New York Arts Project Residency Grant (2008). He has had solo exhibitions in the Philippines, Australia, Japan, China, and Germany, in spaces such as the Vargas Musuem at UP, the Soka Art Center in Beijing, ARNDT Singapore, Rossi & Rossi Ltd. in London, The Luggage Store in San Francisco, California, The Drawing Room, Singapore Art Museum, the Lopez Memorial Museum, Ateneo Art Gallery, Artinformal, and MCAD Manila. He was also one of the curators for the Singapore Biennale in 2013. De Guia has participated at the Art Fair Philippines and the recent Manila Biennale.
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